Retired Art Teacher Builds Enchanting Cob House for Just $250!

Michael Buck, a 59-year-old retired art teacher from Oxfordshire, England, managed to build a gorgeous cob house in his garden for a mere £150 (USD $250). Buck adhered to some basic principles to keep costs down—he used only materials that he could find himself, and he made sure that no power tools were used in the home's construction. The rock-bottom price is an inspiration for anyone who feels that home ownership is an unattainable goal.

Buck initially designed the home on the back of an envelope, and then spent over two years collecting local materials that he foraged or salvaged himself. The floorboards were from a neighbor’s derelict boat, while the glass for the windows was salvaged from a scrapped truck. Even the straw used to thatch the rooftop was collected from fields in the surrounding area.

The house has no electricity and no running water, but a nearby creek provides an ample source of fresh water. Buck keeps the house warm with a woodstove, which provides more than enough to heat the house thanks to its insulated cob walls. An artfully crafted spherical pile of stacked wood outside provides fuel for the stove, a chicken coop offers up free food, while a nearby well serves as a refrigerator. And no house would be complete without a composting toilet—this sits in a separate outhouse.

Buck wanted to set an example for others, and only had to pay the $250 when he ran out of straw and nails during construction. As he puts it: “A house doesn’t have to cost the earth, you only need the earth to build it. I wanted to show that houses don’t have to cost anything. We live in a society where we spend our lives paying our mortgages, which many people don’t enjoy.”

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9 Comments

Marie HelenaJanuary 12, 2015 at 1:09 am

Best wishes Michael , enjoy what you built, it\’s so cute..For an art teacher, such surroundings are an inspiration to do some more art work? Maybe some sketching or painting? All the best, love the little house..keep healthy. (Would love to know what the walls are built from,and did you have a lot of help in building your project?)

how soon can you come to oz & help me build a hobbit house like yours? xo

Graeme CDecember 14, 2013 at 10:59 pm

Damien, You little ray of sunshine. Nowhere in the article did it mention paying modernday inflationary, bankers usuary rates for land (Land wasn’t even mentioned). Nor did it state that things were done legally…. another black hole of monetarism. The point IS that as the pictures attest the house WAS built. It looks gorgeous and the materials to build it (of course he didn’t factor in his own hourly rate or that of half the counties tradesmen) cost about a hundred pounds because he didn’t forage for long enough. I say all power (figuratively) to the man and I hope he gets to live there.

Don’t understand why he eschewed power tools, he could have borrowed them, maybe site power was the issue?
Anyway I fear this article and others like it (the tiny-house movement) are purposely obscuring a major piece of the puzzle. Land prices! This property looks rural, perhaps a few acres. You cant own anything like this near my state capital (Melbourne, VIC) and to buy one anywhere near civilization would cost minimum $150,000. So Micheal’s project would have totaled $150,250. House prices keep going down and land prices the other way.
Even forgetting about the land, the regulatory costs for my 100k house build were around 10k (building surveyor, planning fees .etc). This is part of the reason people build large houses. If your dropping half a million on 1000m^2 of land in the burbs you probably wont feel at all conflicted about spending half that again of a nice house.

Enjoyed the article. Reminds me of the cob house young English couple build (in article about 12 months back). Planning dept. made them rip it down.